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Acting in International Relations? Political Agency in State Theory and Actor-

Networks

Jan-H. Passoth, Department of Sociology, Bielefeld University

Nicholas J. Rowland, Department of Sociology, Pennsylvania State University

Introduction

Who acts in international relations? From state theory generally, and the field of

International Relations specifically, the readymade answer is: ‘states do’ – so long as

we assume states to be the high-modern regime of nation-states that so dominantly

sorted-out conceptual possibilities of political agency during the 20th century. An

alternative approach to global politics, in contrast, searches for political power beyond

the state. Contemporary shifts toward neo-liberal and other transnational regimes are

reshaping the political landscape to enable entities beyond the state to gain importance

in governance. We are, thus, left with two options: We see states as entities capable of

acting on the stage of global politics, or we see states as one of many patterns through

which political activity is enacted. This dichotomy neatly parallels how agency has been

conceptualized in social theory: Either we swallow the bitter pill of essentializing a high-

modern model of human nature to understand how actors establish, maintain, and

transform political order, or we join the deconstruction camp and dissect the

mechanisms, techniques, and discursive patterns that surround this model of human

nature, which will then one day probably be ‘erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the

edge of the sea.’1 We develop this tension in our paper about who or what acts during

international relations.

In the past 50 years of conceptualizing the state, two theoretical positions emerged.

While one group of scholars conceptualized the state as a kind of unitary actor, the

other saw it as an elaborate network.2 Both approaches started out as modest research

heuristics and from complex theoretical traditions, but each was later turned into 1 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970), p. 387.

2 Jan-Hendrik Passoth and Nicholas J. Rowland, ‘Actor-Network State’ International Sociology 25 (2010),

818-841.


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simplistic sets of aphorisms loaded with assumptions that did serious disservice to their

ability to guide research. One of them, perhaps even the most consequential, is the

analytical blending of human nature and agency: Whatever acts during international

relations must be human (or humanlike). Inversely, wherever (political) agency is

expressed, human activity must be involved. The ‘state-as-an-actor approach can be

(and has been) misunderstood as the implementation of a clear-cut concept of human

nature into a conceptual framework for analyzing political agency. In recent IR theory,

for example, this is obvious in Wendt´s aphorism ‘[s]tates are people, too’,3 which neatly

blends together assumptions about human nature, personhood, and state entitivity

under the umbrella of agency. Similarly, the state-as-a-network approach can be (and

also has been) oversimplified as the clear-cut consequence of abandoning high-modern

notions of human nature in favor of ascribing agency to regimes of governmentality.

The result is a deadlock. It is impossible to empirically analyze what kinds of entities act

in the field of international relations without applying, subsuming, and then reifying

ready-made models from the extant literature. Thus, it is impossible to tell what political

agency is – be it state agency, the agency of governmental bureaus, or the agency of

non-state entities – without assuming it a priori. State entitivity is the assumption that a

state is able to act as a unified thing and the assumption that states have the ability and

occasional necessity to interact with one another on the global stage. State entitivity

implies political agency, and models of state agency are largely built on models of

human nature, especially in modern Western traditional thought. Some scholars of

political theory have repeated, if not reified, this link between state entitivity, political

agency, and human nature, while others denied it.4 An alternative position to both would

be to see this link as an open empirical question. If we want to ask such questions

about the state and related political actions and actors, then we must adopt a

conceptual framework that does not presuppose their answers, and instead affords us

3 Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1999), p. 215–24. 4 See, for example, Paul Abrams, ‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,’ Journal of Historical

Sociology 1 (1988), 58-89.


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the chance to empirically follow each or any of these possible enactments. In the

following, we aim to develop such a framework.

Coming from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), Actor-Network Theory

(ANT) is widely known for its disrespectful restatement of concepts central to

sociological theory. Its focus on symmetry5 has challenged commonly held beliefs that

human and non-human agency are different; its insistence on heterogeneity of networks

has arraigned common definitions of social networks. In contemporary (international)

political sociology, ANT has been applied to the study of states and political action,

offering a potential means to see the state simultaneously as both an actor and a

network.6 ANT offers conceptual and empirical innovations regarding problems of (non-

)human agency, different modes of ordering practices, and the performativity of politics.

Therefore, it also opens up the possibility of finally overcoming essentializing

conceptualizations of human nature in the study of political activity, while also making

room for a post-humanist conception of political agency. As ANT is not at all a ready-

made framework that can be applied to any problem or case, this chapter is not arguing

for its value as yet another a theory of international relations. The purpose of this paper

is rather to argue for a certain attitude towards research in the study of politics and

5 When first introduced in David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imaginary (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1976) in the heyday of the “Sociology of Scientific Knowledge” (SSK) the focus on symmetry was

used to methodologically argue for using the same heuristic framework for analyzing both successful and

failed scientific projects and therefore to treat true or false results the same way. When transferred to the

study of technological developments and technical artifacts, e.g. in Trevor J. Pinch and Wiebe E. Bijker

‘The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of

Technology Might Benefit Each Other’ Social Studies of Science 14 (1986), 399-441, the principle of

symmetry became generalized to include all the artifacts that failed or succeeded in the history of a

technology. When early actor-network approaches started using the term, it became even more

generalized to become the famous heuristic device to treat all the elements in the heterogeneous

networks that shaped the history of a technology at least in the beginning as equal contributors to that

history: instruments, scientists, machines and users could be necessary actors. To avoid the danger of

reifying (and mystifying) these actors, some ANT scholars rather focus on the process of assembling

them into multi-faceted networks, a process that was called heterogeneous engineering in John Law

‘Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion.’ In The Social

Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology

edited by Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) p. 111-

134. 6 Passoth and Rowland, ‘Actor-Network State’, 818-841.


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international relations of which ANT might be seen as a paradigm case.7 In order to

reconstruct the conceptual problems in political science, (international) political

sociology, we begin transforming theoretical assumptions, such as the assumption that

states are unitary actors, into empirical questions. In what follows, we outline how the

state-as-an actor camp of scholars established state entitivity, how entitivity was

contested by the state-as-a network camp, and sketch alternative to both.

How, When, and Why the State was Granted Actor-Status

Historically, political agency and state entitivity was not the problem for political theory

that it is today. For 19th and 20th century classical liberalism and orthodox Marxism,

conceptualizing an autonomous entity called the state, and assuming that it was

capable of acting and being acted against, was a matter of drawing up the right

blueprint for political practice. This is, perhaps, unsurprising, because political theory

has long been seen as a calamitous cocktail made from normative and descriptive

elements. In the 1970s, neo–statists sought to overcome this conceptual blend by

‘bringing the state back in’8 and explicitly conceptualizing the state as an actor.

While political agency is a relatively young idea, state entitivity is an old one. The young

Marx conceptualized the state as essentially autonomous from the capitalist class, while

the late Marx saw the state as an indentured servant to the bourgeoisie.9 By the 1960s

Marxist theorizing transformed.10 Gramsci’s ideas became germane; hegemony was at

the core of inquiry into the ideological mechanisms of coercion in capitalist welfare

states. The state was an instrument; the ideal collective capitalist; the structure that

7 A paradigm, as Thomas Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1962) has argued, is not necessarily a full fledged theory or analytic framework, but exemplary

research that helps focus attention and make sense of a vast array of approaches in different fields. 8 See Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 9 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1843-44) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1970); Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848) (London: Penguin, 1998) 10

Susan R. Golding, Gramsci: Contributions to a Theory of Post-Liberal Democracy (Toronto: Toronto

University Press, 1992); Renate Holub, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Post-Modernism

(London/New York: Routledge, 1992); Barry Smart, ‘The Politics of Truth and the Power of Hegemony’, in

D.C. Hoy, Foucault: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 157-73.


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served capitalism no matter who controlled it.11 This conceptualization of the state as a

quasi-autonomous entity emerging from an ensemble of institutions serving various

interests was well established already in neo-Marxist theorizing in the 1960/70s.12

But, for some, relative autonomy was not enough.13 Assuming complete conceptual

state autonomy meant states could act and be acted upon in a ‘world-historic context’

structured by international relationships or conflicts but also by domestic conditions.14

Gradually, state entitivity was conflated with political agency. But, to neo–statists, state

entitivity was originally a heuristic rather than a conceptual perspective, something to

search for in empirical data, not something to assume a priori. The state for them is not

per se an autonomous entity. The state gains autonomy – or agency – and loses it in

historical context. This insight was a well-spring for comparative research on

mechanisms of state power15 and how state formation and/or war-making shape the

institutional environment states operate within.16 While it ignored the relevance of civil

society and gender,17 another bias developed when actor modeling blended with

political conservatism and anti-Marxism during the 1980/90s: This heuristic framework

became a taken-for-granted theoretical presumption.18

11

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1971). 12

Claus Offe, Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates: Aufsätze zur politischen Soziologie

(Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1972); Nicos Poulantzas, Staatstheorie. Politischer Überbau, Ideologie,

Sozialistische Demokratie (Hamburg: VSA, 1978). 13

Evans et al., Bringing the State Back In, p. 4. 14

Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 290. 15

Michael Mann, The Social Sources of Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Eric

Nordlinger, The Autonomy of the Democratic State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). 16

Michael Mann, ‘War and Social Theory.’ in M. Shaw & C. Creighton (eds.), The Sociology of War and

Peace (London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 54-72; Bruce D. Porter, War and the Rise of the State (New York:

Free Press, 1996); Charles Tilly, ‘Reflections on the History of European State-Making.’ in C. Tilly (ed),

The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 3-

83. 17

Linda Gordon, ‘The Welfare State: Towards a Socialist Feminist Perspective.’ in R. Miliband, L. Panich

& J. Saville (eds), Socialist Register (London: SRC Graham, 1990); Jessop, ‘Bringing the State Back In

(Yet Again)’, 149-153. 18

Leonard Binder, ‘The Natural History of Development Theory’ Comparative Studies in Society and

History 28 (1986), 3-33; Rianne Mahon, ‘From Bringing to Putting: The State in Late Twentieth-Century

Social Theory’, Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers Canadiens de Sociologie 16 (1991), 119-44.


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Insistence on state entitivity persists ever since, despite convincing research on state

engineering projects that draws the existence of the state into question. These works

show how nearly any project is born of a menu of possibilities lashed together and then

winnowed down by a variety of actors until a single unified course of action is

established and then executed by a much distributed mass of agents and agencies –

not as the result of the state’s will or interests.19

State entitivity endures among scholars for conceptual reasons. By linking the neo–

statist approach to a particular interpretation of Weber’s definition of the state as ‘a

compulsory political organization with continuous operations [politischer

Anstaltsbetrieb]’ whose ‘administrative staff successfully upholds the claim of the

monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order,’20 it was

also linked to the rising mindset of methodological individualism21 and therefore with a

certain understanding of political agency: This mindset saw collective action as the

aggregate of individual human action or as the activity of collective actors modeled with

a certain ideal-type of human nature as its backdrop. Consequently, the behavior of

these conceptual entities was modeled after ‘homo œconomicus’ replete with interests,

preferences, and intentions; state entitivity and political agency were united under a

largely assumed and inexplicit model of human nature.

The assumption of state entitivity neatly fits the rhetoric of global politics: ‘Libya rises

up’, ‘Greece is broke’, or ‘China copies Germany’s patents.’ Westerners are

accustomed to ascribing political agency to singularized state entities, and it serves as a

shortcut for summing-up whole populations, governments and administrations, even

national businesses. Whether or not this shift was fostered by the use of neo–statist

19

Patrick Carroll, ‘Beyond the Regulatory State Idea: The Constitutive State as a Co-production of

Science and Government’ (Society for the Social Studies of Science. Montréal, Québec, 2007); Bruno

Latour, ‘When Things Strike Back A Possible Contribution of Science Studies To The Social Sciences.’

British Journal of Sociology 51 (1999), 105-123; Nick Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political

Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Nick Rose & Peter Miller, ‘Political Power

beyond the State: Problematics of Government.’ British Journal of Sociology 43 (1992), 173-205. 20

Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, Volume 1 (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1978), p. 54. 21

James Coleman, Foundations of Social Theory (London: Belknap Press, 1990).


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concepts in political, journalistic, and everyday discourse: State entitivity and the

assumption of its a priori political agency became a presupposition. According to

Abrams,22 sociologists inadvertently reified ‘the state’ in their analyses, so much so that

the practice is now endemic. Scott’s research, for example, describes state-driven

planning in ‘high-modern’ projects,23 which, in Mitchell’s words, makes the state appear

like ‘a person writ large.’24 But the reification of state entitivity is not only present in

sociological accounts of the state, but also in debates on the study of international

relations, culminating in Wendt´s conclusion that ‘if we want to have states then it is

better they take the form of persons rather than something more amorphous, because

this will help make their effects more politically accountable.’25

Bartelson and Ringmar have shown up the tendency to conceptualize the state as both

a given entity and an entity that has enough features in common with the type of human

actors scholars are (based on commonsense) most familiar with.26 That states can be

thought of as entities like human actors acting on the stage of world politics is a

common theme already in realist political theory.27 Assumptions about how this human-

like actor will act in international relations can be directly derived from equivalent

assumptions about human nature and human agency as old as Hobbes´ Leviathan.

With a homo œconomicus model nested deeply in state theory, state entitivity, political

agency, and human nature blend together such that states become ‘unified, purposive,

utility-maximising, actor[s].’28

22

Abrams, ‘Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State.’ 58-89. 23

James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 24

Timothy Mitchell, ‘The Limits of the State: Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics’ American

Political Science Review 85 (1991), 77–96, p. 83. 25

Alexander Wendt, ‘The State as Person in International Theory, Review of International Studies, 30

(2004), 289–316, p. 316. 26

Jens Bartelson, The Critique of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Erik

Ringmar, ‘On the Ontological Status of the State’ European Journal of International Relations 2 (1996),

439-466. 27

See Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p.

186-236; R.B.J.Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 81-103. 28

de Mesquita, The War Trap, p. 87-92.


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However, these human-like state entities seem to disappear once the empirical analysis

begins to trace political agency in bureaucracies, organizations, and regional and local

institutions, which is a key insight from a long tradition of pluralist scholars.29 There is

moreover an equally long tradition of arguing that the assumed comparability of ‘state

agency’ (i.e., the conceptual blending of state entitivity, political agency, and human

nature) should only be understood as a working metaphor.30 And it is this metaphorical

‘as-if’ that Wendt argues against when attempting to re-establish a strong version of the

state-as-an actor (even a person) by referring loosely to biological debates on

organisms and analytical philosophy when discussing the potential emergence of

intentions.31

Rejecting State Entitivity by Unweaving the Networks of Stateness

Also emerging from the 1960/70s, in another scholarly camp state autonomy was

rejected in favor of a new, much distributed model of political agency as manifest in and

between citizens as they self-regulate. While neo–statists started with a purely analytic

framework, which was conceptually reified afterwards, this approach was a theoretical

movement before it became a full-fledged heuristics for interpreting political processes

and relations from the 1980s on. It privileges a different vantage point, as it emphasizes

the complex and interwoven conditions of statehood as the outcome of a set of

contingent and unstable processes of governing citizens, rather than thinking of policy

decisions and international relations as the outcomes of actions of large and powerful

entities.

29

See, for example, Graham Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston:

Little, Brown, 1971); John D. Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision: New Dimensions of

Political Analysis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974). 30

See, for example, Barry Buzan, Richard Little, and Roy Jones, The Logic of Anarchy: Neorealism to

Structural Realism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Robert Gilpin, ‘The Richness of the

Tradition of Political Realism’, in Neorealism and its Critics edited by Robert Keohane (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1986), Pp. 301–21. Also, Ringmar has argued that the antagonism between

assumption and metaphor has been around since Hobbes and Hume: ‘While Hobbes thus regarded man

as a metaphor for the state, Hume regarded the state as a metaphor for man’, Ringmar, Ontology of the

State, p. 448. 31

Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics, 215–24.


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Scholars of state reorganization now often see the state as a network of actors and

agencies – a perspective which offers a fresh, process-oriented view of political

structures.32 The radical theoretical underpinnings of this perspective are crucial to its

emergence. Foucault’s re-conceptualization of power and his work on neoliberal

‘gouvernementalité’ set the model in motion, but his vision of the state would go

underdeveloped for decades. Power, for Foucault, is neither a capacity of someone ‘in

power’ nor a possession of someone who ‘has power.’33 Applied to state entitivity, no

state can be in power nor possess it, so entitivity could be challenged on these grounds

alone – but Foucault has more. Power, Foucault maintains, is manifest between us, in

networks of influence, constituted by the whole machinery and mechanisms

implemented in disciplining and regulating subjected subjects who then, in turn, self-

discipline and self-regulate. In this perspective, there are no states, only stateness

(étatisation).34 Stateness is, at least under modern conditions, the exercise and

expression of power. Detailed analysis of the various parts of this machinery has

inspired numerous research projects under the label of Governmentality Studies. They

reveal that whatever looks like a state is constituted by human relationships and

becomes a way of linking, in a quasi-Foucauldian terminology, what can be said, done,

and seen.

Post-Foucauldians emphasize the mundane ‘art of government.’35 Also referred to as

‘microphysical methods of order,’ in Mitchel’s detailed analysis of political institutions,

the art of government captures established networks of disciplinary power that enact

‘the organized power of armies, schools and factories, and other distinctive institutions

of the modern state.’36 The state ceases to be identified as the cause of regulatory

techniques and becomes their effect, which is clear in Steinmetz’s work uncovering the

32

See e.g. Rose, Powers of Freedom or Rose and Miller, ‘Political Power beyond the State’, 173-205. 33

Michel Foucualt, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977); Michel

Foucault, ‘Governmentality’ in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality edited by G. Burchell, C.

Gordon, & P. Miller (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 87–104. 34

Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), p. 106. 35

Jessop, ‘Bringing the state back in (yet again)’, 7. 36

Mitchel, ‘The limits of the state’, 92, 95.


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diverse interwoven processes of state-formation37 wherein the supposedly monolithic

state under construction ‘appears as an abstraction in relation to the concreteness of

the social’.38

Foucault’s ‘microphysics of power,’ however, cannot answer a simple but crucial

question: Why are states commonly conceptualized as actors, if they are not, in some

meaningful way, actors? Foucault’s best answer is historical. Populations could be

regulated by other institutionalized forms besides states, but techniques of

subordinating modern citizens converged under this strange abstraction called the state,

hence, under modern conditions, we notice a ‘governmentalization of the state.’39

How should scholars and politicians answer the same question? Non-governmental

organizations and multinational corporations grow in prominence, stabilizing and

destabilizing alliances with government agencies across the globe. When states pursue

their own de-governmentalization, they no longer resemble unitary entities, and this

makes network-based theories of the state all the more appealing to researchers and

journalists.40 Conceptually, seeing states as networks shifts analytical attention to

interlinked and interwoven practices that form not states but stateness. And yet, this

school of thought’s counterintuitive use of concepts (e.g., power, governance,

governmentality) and its sheer popularity have led to many diverse and sometimes

contradictory uses of these terms. This huge corpus on high-modern neoliberal

governmentality and the knowledge-power relationship remains incommensurable to

any description that views states as actors.41

From this perspective, the question of political agency is fairly open. Human nature - at

least in the essentialist position - seems absent in post-Foucauldian studies of political

relations. Foucault’s analysis in the ‘Order of Things’ shows how ‘humanity’ was at the

37

George Steinmetz (ed.), State/Culture: State-Formation after the Cultural Turn (Ithaca/London: Cornell

University Press, 1999). 38

Mitchel, ‘The limits of the state’, 95. 39

Foucault, Governmentality, p. 103. 40

Rose & Miller, Political Power beyond the State. 41

Additionally, seeing states as networks is also often merely employed in a metaphorical sense.


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center of re-framing modern discourse in the fields of economics, biology, and

linguistics.42 Still, this small mention of human nature is not enough to establish a full-

fledged image of political agency for state actors from Foucault’s work. If we then ask,

who is acting in international relations?, we must answer: apparently, no one. The

closest thing to agency in a network model must be the interwoven and ongoing

enactment of a vast network of mechanisms, techniques, and discourses that generate

patterns of self-regulatory human behavior. A huge body of literature under the label of

governmentality studies focuses on showing how under contemporary conditions,

techniques of self-governing have extended to every corner of modern life. Driven also

by the misconception that governmentality was a neologism connecting ‘government’

and ‘mentality’,43 those searching for the subtle traces of this transformation under

(post)modern conditions turned the question of ‘who acts?’ into ‘what acts?’. In IR,

numerous scholars see this post-Foucauldian perspective as a workable alternative to

conceptualizing the international arena in which human-like states act.44 However,

Wanda Vrasti argued, convincingly, that employing Foucault’s concepts at a global level

is invalid; not because the network model is invalid, but because post-Foucauldian IR

adopted them hastily without reflection.45

States as Actor-Networks

ANT provides an alternative to both positions, especially regarding agency. How can

states be singularized actors during international relations and vast networks of

42

Foucault, The Order of Things. 43

For a critique see Thomas Lemke ‘Neoliberalismus, Staat und Selbstechnologien. Ein kritischer

Überblick über die governmentality studies’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 41 (2000), 31–47. 44

David Chandler, ‘Critiquing Liberal Cosmopolitanism? The Limits of the Biopolitical Approach’,

International Political Sociology 3 (2009), 53-70; David Chandler, ‘Globalising Foucault: Turning Critique

into Apologia – A Response to Kiersey and Rosenow’, Global Society 24 (2010), 135-42; Jonathan

Joseph, ‘The Limits of Governmentality: Social Theory and the International’, European Journal of

International Relations 16 (2010a), 223-46; Jonathan Joseph, ‘What Can Governmentality Do for IR?’

International Political Sociology 2 (2010b), 202-4; Jan Selby, ‘Engaging Foucault: Discourse, Liberal

Governance and the Limits of Foucauldian IR’, International Relations 21 (2007), 324-45; Wendy Larner

& William Walters, Global Governmentality. Governing International Spaces (London/New York:

Routledge, 2004). 45

Wanda Vrasti, Volunteer Tourism in the Global South. The Self as Enterprise (London/New York:

Routledge, 2012).


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mechanisms encouraging citizens to self-regulate? The mistake of past

conceptualizations of the state and stateness was insistence on their mutual exclusivity.

An ANT approach to states avoids state reification or trivialization through post-

structuralist insights, especially that of multiplicity.46 Searching for the ontology of the

state, we contend, is a waste of time. Instead, with ANT, we attend to ontologies of

state. The shift toward state multiplicity is subtle, but important for state theory. As a

analogy, we draw on Mol’s The Body Multiple, wherein ‘multiplicity’ is expertly

deployed.47 For Mol, the body is at once ‘one standing bag-of-meat’ and yet only made

sense of in different, sometimes competing ways, because ‘the body’ is at once one

thing and many things depending on how it ‘registers’ on charts, diagrams, reports,

films, etc. Crucially, Mol abandoned the search for the ontology of the body and,

instead, attended to the ontologies of body. States and bodies have a lot in common;

from Hobbes’ original imagery of the state as a humanesque Leviathan to Wendt’s

contemporary insistence that states are persons (too), the role of bodies has a long

history in state theory. Still, for state theory to make the leap that Mol did, we must

radically re-conceptualize ‘actors’ and ‘action.’ We must also create a vocabulary to

examine states as actors without recognizing or reifying them as such analytically or

literally. We can never again ask ‘what is a state?’ and must instead see states as

assemblages, gatherings, and things made of many other things depending on how

they register.

The proposed approach is an attempt to overcome a problem for IR as well as STS.

Actor models of the state provided no possible entry point to start studying the

infrastructural setting that Rose and Miller called the ‘technologies of government.’

Network models are more appropriate, but also inadequate. Fashioned from fine-

grained studies conducted during the 1980/90s, post-Foucauldians, in rejecting the

existence of state agency, missed an opportunity to study the way in which these

infrastructural developments were practically bound to notions of state entitivity.

46

Passoth and Rowland, ‘Actor-Network State’, 828. 47

Annemarie Mol. The Body Multiple (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).


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In ANT, we assume that actors we study exist (i.e., take meaning, exert force, and,

therefore, ‘act’), but only in relation to other heterogeneous actors variously assembled

in networks. And this relationality operates horizontally, so that any appearance of

vertical scale is, in principle, an artifact of lateral relations. As a shortcut, one might

even say that this is the main insight upon which ANT is built. Masses of small,

heterogeneous actors become tremendous sources of force, which, like levers, can shift

and re-align the various social and material associations that make durable different

facets of society.48

If we assume concepts such as ‘the market’ or ‘the state’ translate, respectively, to

insights like ‘markets drive the economy’ or ‘states act on the global scene,’ then the

conclusion is already written because the ontological insights are assumed in advance;

the research, in effect, has already been done. If state entitivity is instead treated as a

hypothesis then it is neither abstract, assumed, nor transcendental. It is made up of

numerous interlinked mundane practices and procedures that build the state as a

unitary actor, or fail to. Thus, for scholars, it is an empirical matter to see how states are

enacted. The construction of actor-networks,49 their maintenance50 over time, and their

eventual or stalled disbandment51 are the critical processes to observe and account for

by tracing the associations made, maintained, and broken. An additionally valuable line

48

Bruno Latour. Reassembling the Social (London: Oxford, 2005). Of course, we are not the first to notice this: Elements of ANT are readily found in research on statehood. For example, Carroll (2006:14,15) recognizes material agency, and, when applied to matters of state, it becomes clear that materiality shapes and is shaped by discourse and practice in cases such as Mukerji’s (1997) gardens, Davis’s (1986) demonstrations, and Carroll's (2006:145) bogs. Patrick Carroll, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Garden of Versailles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Susan G. Davis, Parades and Power (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986). 49

See, for example, John Law, ‘On the Methods of Long Distance Control: Vessels, Navigation, and the

Portuguese Route to India’ In Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? Sociological

Review Monograph 32 edited by John Law (London: Routledge, Henley, 1986), p. 234-263. 50

See, for example, Anique Hommels. Unbuilding Cities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005); T. Dant, 'The

Work of Repair: Gesture, Emotion and Sensual Knowledge'. Working Paper (Unpublished, 2009;

available at: http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/26893/1/work_of_repair_3.pdf); T. Dant, Materiality and Society

(Buckingham: Open University Press, 2005). 51

See, for example, Bruno Latour. Aramis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); John Law and

Michel Callon, ‘Engineering and Sociology in a Military Aircraft Project: A Network Analysis of Technical

Change’ Social Problems 35 (1988), 284-297.

http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/26893/1/work_of_repair_3.pdf


14

of research could attend to the practical matter of how politicians and other individuals

speak in the name of an entity called ‘the state.’ The obvious necessity of alliance-

building through enrollment becomes not just something to study but something of

practical use to construct boundaries between constellations of networked individuals

that buoy the material and cultural practices that give form to states and statehood. The

state hypothesis is likely to be constructed from a practical array of concepts that link

technologies of government infrastructure to the processes of hiding their nuts-and-bolts

beneath entity-like surfaces.

The state, therefore, is and must be spoken for, because ‘the state’ – a single, unitary

actor – does not exist other than as a practically relevant hypothesis occasionally

enunciated. We speculate on states’ declining relevance, practically and scholastically,

but unless we stop encountering its invocation in the material we study, we cannot

reasonably assume or insist that there is no such thing as the or a state. Speaking for

the state is not to be understood as merely linguistic, although this does provide a good

start. Indeed, actors can enunciate the state in practical ways by counting citizens and

quantifying natural resource stores, or by defending territories with strong rhetoric of

retribution and installing diplomats who then ‘speak for’ the state verbatim. States are

performed, enacted, or spoken for in various ways by linking the hypothesis of an ‘actor-

like’ state to a certain territory, to procedures of political activity, to a global polity, and to

the human beings that are labeled as its citizens. Not unlike scientist who (sometimes)

have to speak for their probes and their objects of investigation in order to make them

become real and effective,52 state spokesmen, who do not have to be human, build-up

states as macro entities by speaking for other micro-actors. In this sense, a fence at a

frontier ‘speaks’ for a population that has to be protected in the same way that a

politician ‘speaks’ for the same population that has to be governed – and both protect

the idea of the state and its role in protecting the people ‘it’ represents. This raises

tangential issues dear to social theory, especially concerns over legitimacy.53

52

See, for example, Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of

Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 53

While an interesting direction for future research, it is beyond scope of this chapter; however, see, for

example, Shane P. Mulligan. ‘The Uses of Legitimacy in International Relations’ Millennium - Journal of


15

Seeing states as actor-networks obviates the need for bogus assumptions, inherited

from state theory, that collapse human nature and political agency. It also avoids

trivializing the unitary actor model of states by opening it up as an empirical question.

Thus, from the actor-network perspective, asking ‘who acts during international

relations?’ must be reformulated into ‘how is state agency established, expressed,

granted, and transformed?’ That question must be answered empirically, in the study of

both domestic and international politics. State agency or autonomy are established,

maintained, and can dissolve over time, and these achievements and failures are a

feature of the vast, widely distributed array technologies of government that (un)enroll,

(de)align, and (dis)invoke the state hypothesis. From this vantage point, human nature

might indeed appear again, but on the empirical rather than conceptual front. As Latour

famously argued in We Have Never Been Modern, the ontological constitution of

contemporary society separates hybrid masses of agencies primarily by separating

human entities from asocial and natural things. The same holds true for states: The

Leviathan might have been modeled with human nature in mind, but in a world of

increasing hybridization of agency, we can see, from an actor-network perspective, that

this is but one possible invocation of political agency.54

Conclusion

Assumptions about human nature have influenced conceptualizations of political agency

throughout the history of state theory. In this chapter, we showed that the question of

‘who acts during international relations?’ has been answered (i.e., ‘the state’), dismissed

(i.e., ‘no one’), and subsequently transformed (i.e., to ask ‘what is acting?’ the answer

being ‘technologies of government’) in extant state models. We documented how states

have been conceptualized in scholarly research and elucidated how they are thought of

as actors by some scholars and as elaborate networks by others. Both traditions have

tremendous utility for understanding the inner workings of public bureaucracies and the

International Studies 34 (2006), 349-375 or Cathryn Johnson, Timothy J. Dowd, and Cecilia L. Ridgeway

‘Legitimacy as a Social Process’ Annual Review of Sociology 32 (2006), 53-78. 54

Jan-Hendrik Passoth, Birgit Peuker and Michael Schillmeier, Agency without Actors? (London:

Routledge, 2012).


16

global efforts of states during international relations, both approaches appear to be

rooted in practical political trends and transitions, and both approaches have resulted in

robust bodies of literature.

Seeing states as actors freed state theory from conceptualizing the state either as an

instrument of control or as a disinterested mediator between diverse groups. However,

this movement toward ‘bringing the state back in’ has had the side-effect of producing

its own problematic interpretations of the state. If the state is out there, why is it that we

cannot take a picture of it? If it is a person, why can we not meet him/her? The state has

been frequently confused with an actual macro-being of its own – an entity or unitary

actor whose actions can be studied by social researchers and abstractly systematized

by political theorists.55 This is also where human nature was blended into understanding

this unitary actor’s political agency; the state was modeled with a high-modern vision of

human nature in mind. This was partly, Latour argued,56 because it fits our linguistic

frameworks that tend to ‘humanize’ non-human entities, and partly because of an

underlying methodological individualism that, transferred to an abstract level of

collective action, only allows for modeling actors as entities with intentions, preferences,

and interests: a homo œconomicus writ large.

Conversely, seeing the state as a network emerged as an attempt to re-conceptualize

the ontology of states. Importantly influenced by post-structural theory, especially by the

works on power by Foucault, analytical attention shifted away from actions attributable

to states (i.e., as unitary actors) and toward complexes of interlinked practices that bring

about flexible, self-regulating citizens no longer in need of a strong, unitary state. Much

less intuitive but no less sophisticated than seeing the state as an actor, the state-as-a-

network model was beset with misinterpretation, which compromised contributions

55

Michel Callon and Bruno Latour, ‘Unscrewing the Big Leviathan: How actors macrostructure reality and

how sociologists help them to do so’ In Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Toward an

Integration of Micro- and Macro-Sociologies edited by K. D. Knorr-Cetina and A. V. Cicourel (Boston:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). 56

Latour, We have never been modern.


17

seeded by post-structuralist thought on the state.57 This is obvious when focusing on the

problem of human nature again: For post-structuralists, the ‘human’ in human nature

emerged as a frame of reference to restructure discourse formations in the 18th century.

This interpretation of human nature, as a specific historical creation unfit for use in

theorizing states, displaces humans from political agency, so that, especially in

governmentality studies, we mainly observe political agency as expressed in and

between technologies of government that form a complex web, or network, of

statehood. We do not reject this position completely, but consider it incomplete given

the unquestionably important role that humans play in social life.

As an alternative to both camps, we presented an actor-network approach to states

which enables us to acknowledge both and yet embrace neither model of the state by

opening them up as empirical questions rather than accepting them as theoretical

suppositions. Political agency is, likewise, no longer something to assume or reject as

explicitly human or otherwise; instead both humans and non-humans are viewed as

equal contributors to political outcomes. With this model of political agency, we can no

longer assume micro phenomena to be necessarily fluid, interactive settings; macro

phenomena can no longer be anticipated as stable, unitary structures or agents. Every

macro phenomenon is a local achievement, but does not necessarily stay local.

Whatever seems huge – and, therefore, powerful or structural – stays small during

analysis, and states only become powerful through micro-level assemblages of

mechanisms, procedures, texts, and trained bodies. States become unitary actor-like

entities not by virtue of the scientist studying them, but by the assemblages that

produce them and by practices of invoking the state.

As the social turns out to be a relational material assemblage, as structures turn out to

be ongoing material and discursive achievements, and as macro-phenomena turn out to

be local enactments, some of (international) political sociology’s most beloved

assumptions about the stuff that societies and, consequently, politics are made of have

to be revised. By conceptualizing states as actor-networks, (international) political

57

Lemke, ‘Neoliberalismus, Staat und Selbsttechnologien‘, 31–47.


18

sociology loses a parsimonious way to speak of states as institutions, unitary actors on

a world stage, or as political entities sui generi. In exchange, however, a line of research

in International Relations adopting a flexible framework for analyzing states would

observe how states become and are maintained as institutions, what enables politicians

to speak for them as actors in international relations, and how political entities of all

forms are constructed, invoked, and performed.


19

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